12/11/2025
Last week I was fortunate to hop on over the Colorado for some great learning and practicing of oral extraction techniques. It was so wonderful to meet up with new and familiar faces and work together.
I have so many clients worried about extractions and I get all sorts of stories from years past.
BUT! Did you know it’s RARE we ever recommend laying a horse down under anesthesia to extract a tooth? Nearly all of them these days are done standing while sedated and extracted orally. No big holes into the head unless absolutely necessary.
Last week we worked on three techniques. MITSE, Coronectomy, and Sectioning.
MITSE are the first few pictures where we place a screw into the tooth, or tooth root fragment, under radiographic guidance. Then, with the screw in place, we can tap it out and out it comes through the mouth.
Coronectomy and Sectioning I was able to learn some new tips beyond what I was already working with. It’s so great to have new tricks in my pocket. For these techniques, we are using a drill made for the oral cavity to make more space to loosen the tooth and extract it or to section it into 2 or 3 pieces then extract each one separately.
You can see on the radiographs that we started off in the wrong direction. One quick adjustment and we were on the right track.
One of my colleagues also took a minute to extract the pulp from the tooth! How cool is that! That is the jelly squid looking structure that serves as the live portion of the tooth! So at your horse’s exam and we talk about pulp horns, this is exactly what we are referring to. On the tooths surface the pulp horns are those brown shiny lines that should be smooth as glass as you glide over them. But underneath, this is what you find and it goes all the way to the apex (root) of the tooth! That is a lot of live tissue in there!
Hope that helps put some minds at ease knowing how far we have come in Equine Dentistry and what we can offer your horse here at the clinic.
Enjoy the sunshine and snow today!
